'100 Degrees of Longitude'

If you are looking for business advice or suggestions on strategy, please read a previous column or kindly wait until next month.

Today, we will talk about “one hundred”.

The Latin word for one hundred is centum. When one hundred men got together they were called a century. Centuries were considered the optimal number of men anyone could command. More than that number was considered too unwieldy. The commanding officer (called a Centurion) lost track of men’s names and responsibilities with larger groups. 

The soldiers in the Roman Legions were paid daily by a ration of salt. The Latin word for salt is sal so this daily salt wage was known as a salarium. Eventually the actual dispensing of salt was replaced by a sum of money that could be used to buy salt. So, today, every time you get your monthly salary think of how much salt you could buy with it.

In the 16th c. silver was discovered in the area that we know of today as the Czech Republic, in the town of Joachimstal. The coins that were minted were known as Joachimsthaler, which eventually got shortened to thaler. Dutch traders brought these coins to the New World, where they became known as dollars. Today, the dollar is in use in most of North America, as well as in Africa and many countries in Asia [Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Brunei, Australia and New Zealand].

The dollar is commonly divided into units called cents and so we are back to Latin and the concept of 100.

By the way, when did one hundred come to mean 100? Before the 18th c. one hundred could mean any number up to 120 depending on the type of object being counted. The exact amount of 100 was called a small hundred while larger amounts were known as great hundred.

Now we all know that a century has 100 years. But did you know that January 1, 2000 was NOT the first day of the 21st century? Since there was no year zero, the first year in the western calendar was year 1, so the first year of the 2nd century had to be year 101. The first day of the 21st century was January 1, 2001, not 2000.

The mathematician Edward Kasner was working with large numbers and needed a name for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). He asked his 9-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta to invent a word, and the young Milton said “Googol”. 

In 1996, two research students were working on a search engine which they had named “Backrub” to determine the ranking of a site they checked backlinks. Perhaps suspecting that people did not want to “backrub” information, and realising that their system searched extremely large quantities of data, the two students changed the name of the company to the above mathematical term. While they might have been maths geniuses, they certainly were not keen spellers, and the mis-spelled name of this new company Google is one most of us use every day.

Many of us are also familiar with the phrase “First 100 days” referring to the start of a politician’s work after his election. The term was first used by US President Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected during the Great Depression and used his first 100 days vigorously to pass a series of measures aimed at combating the global crisis.  Businessmen as well as politicians are often graded on how well they perform during their first 100 days in power. 

On May 30, 2005, the baht was at 40 to the dollar, the SET was at 667, and the first column by this writer appeared in The Nation. Since then both the SET as well as the baht have risen strongly, and this is now the 100th column by this writer. Readers are thanked for being patient with the sometimes silly things written here, and thanked also for the kind e-mails sent over the years. Next month, we will go back to talking about business strategy, but perhaps once in seven years we are allowed to relax a bit and write a column that has no point.

 

Eric Rosenkranz (www.ethree-asia.com) assists both existing companies as well as start-ups to develop their long-term strategy and achieve success in their business. Usually his comments make sense, but not 100 per cent of the time. Much of his work is in Bangkok, one of three cities to sit on the 100th degree of Longitude.

Follow his “Creating Success” series in the Hi! Managers column every fourth Friday of the month.